


Not Found in the Light of the Sun

by Sammelsurium



Category: Ancient Greek Religion & Lore, Disney - All Media Types, Pinocchio (1940)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Gen, Horror, Immortality, Transformation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-15
Updated: 2020-03-15
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:41:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23161153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sammelsurium/pseuds/Sammelsurium
Summary: Jiminy goes on. And on.
Relationships: Jiminy Cricket & Pinocchio, Past Eos/Tithonus (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 5





	Not Found in the Light of the Sun

It’s lucky that Jiminy is a creature of conscience. If he were the jealous sort, he would’ve cut the puppet’s strings the moment the old man gets it into his head that it should be taught to be a real boy. Real boys, Jiminy’s learned, ought to be avoided at all costs. Real boys are capricious, mean, and messy. Real boys like stepping on bugs. Real boys have shining eyes and soft flesh, where magic loves to burrow, where wishes come to seed. Jiminy is too old a cricket to dream of wished. He’s too little a man to deal in magic. He knows he could have smashed the doll before the fairy so much as set foot upon the windowsill. He  _ knows. _

But killing little boys just isn’t done--even facsimiles of boys, cobbled out of dusty charms and scraps of unused wood. Terribly unconscientious, and not the sort of thing that looks good to the folks above. Besides, it would have disappointed the fairy; and a disappointed fairy is a terrible sight. She’s terrible enough as she is, all tall and bright and shimmery. There’s something magical about that shade of blue. Something undeniable.

“You’re looking awfully well, miss,” he tells her.

“You, too, Jiminy.”

“Can’t tell you how good it is to see you again.”

She smiles sadly. Shrugs. She is the color of the dawn star. She is a story Jiminy long ago forgot. And even she cannot give him back his old being, for she has changed, and he has changed, and the past fades so quickly away.

She still smiles, though and offers him a consolation prize: a shard of a star, sharp and hard-angled and bright, like a shadow of the sky Jiminy used to have at his fingertips. Now he can barely stand to touch it, so fiery and bright and close. It’s a memory he can’t bear to remember. It’s better days long past. It’s better days to come. It’s almost as good a gift as he could hope for.

For all his whining, the puppet comes out of his transformation more or less the same. Still new to the world. Still small and knobbly and ticky-tacky. Still a terrible liar. He doesn’t get a star-shard for himself, and for good reason: the light would burn him right up, like so much tinder. 

Jiminy wonders if being human makes such a great difference at all. He once thought it did--but time moves on, and Jiminy changes and changes. Perhaps it does make a difference, and perhaps it doesn’t. He simply cannot remember.

* * *

The fairy leaves. The boy stays, and Jiminy decides it’s time he get the sawdust out of his joints.He hasn’t left Italy for centuries, so he goes north to France, and then Germany, and then Scandinavia. He’s good, really: he brings about a few boys, re-educates a few girls, spreads goodness and song and magic like a robin on the first day of spring. His goals remain pure, his soul uncorrupted--more or less--and he can’t help but feel a little more righteous. A little closer to human. He thinks it’s the blue fairy’s blessing: he’s kept her star all these years, burning upon his chest, and against it, and into it, and one day his heart is all afire and his eyes see a strange brightness in every corner and it won’t stop, not for nothing. He can’t get it out now, and he’s not sure he should.

He’s not gone for long--not long for him, at least. He finds that Italy is brighter than he left it, frenetic and angry and anticipant. He lingers in Venice for a few months, watching, waiting for a sign. Then the fire in his chest pushes him forward. the light that lingers in his eyes leading him to Tuscany. Some odd sense of duty suggests that he look for Gepetto. He finds him easily: dead. Predictably.

Humans die. Humans die, and life goes on. The shop is still there, a candle burning a halo into its small dark window. Jiminy creeps in through the window-crack into a toy shop that’s exactly the same as it was thirty-odd years ago.

Almost. This time, the man sitting at the table whittling a toy soldier is not quite Gepetto.

Jiminy scurries down from the window. He stops just south of Pinnochio’s foot, taking a moment to contort his mouth into the right shape for speaking. “You look like him,” he says. It’s a bit odd to see in a former puppet; a little amusing. 

Pinocchio jumps at Jiminy’s voice, dropping his whittling knife. Understandable. It’s when he pulls a much larger, sharper knife out of his desk that Pinocchio starts to worry.

The man’s eyes twitch back and forth across the room, beady and bright. “Who’s there?” he snaps.

Jiminy scuttles up the table-leg, reveaaling himself in the dim red lamplight. Pinocchio clutches the knife tighter. “Relax,” Jiminy says. “Don’t you recognize an old--?”

Pinocchio makes a stab at the table. Jiminy doesn’t get to finish the sentence. He dances back, grazed a little across the leg. Maybe he should’ve given Pinocchio more warning. He dodges the second blow by an inch, the third by a hair’s width.

Jiminy may be immortal, but there are some things he simply can’t abide. He jumps forward onto Pinocchio’s shirt and scrabbles up his chest onto the familiar shoulder.

Pinnochio pauses.

“It’s  _ terribly _ impolite to forget your old friends,” Jiminy whispers in the human’s ear. His voice is scratchy from disuse, but he hasn’t quite forgotten how to talk yet.

The man sits completely still for a few seconds. Then he takes a breath. He grabs Jiminy carefully by the torso with one large hand, bringing him up before a pair of bloodshot blue eyes. “Jiminy?”

The creature bows as best he can. “The very same.”

Pinocchio grins. Then he starts to laugh. He slams his free hand down on the table, digging dirty fingernails into the wood, his body shaking with mirth. Once upon a time, thirty-odd years ago, a fairy turned him into a real boy, small and soft. Now Pinocchio is a real man: big and loud and rough, with an eon of world-weariness carved into his face.

The knife hits the floor with a thud. Pinocchio leans back into his chair and drops the cricket on the table. “It’s been a long time,” he says, by way of apology.

Jiminy adjusts his bowtie, straightens his hat. “Not so long.” Thirty years? Forty? All a drop in the bucket.

Pinocchio leans in, squinting. He could be a younger Gepetto. Or an older one. He has gray hair now, and a gray beard, and the gentle frown of the pain that tends to accompany aging. He must be short-sighted, like his father, but Jiminy doubts he can spare the money for spectacles. “You’ve changed a lot,” he grunts.

“So have you,” says the cricket. 

The man snorts. “Don’t give me that,” he says. He flicks the cricket, hard. “I didn’t grow  _ new legs. _ I didn’t grow  _ new eyes. _ ”

Perfectly reasonable changes, for an insect; or at least, changes of a reasonable magnitude. Pinocchio ought to see bees. “Maybe it has been a while,” he admits.

Pinnochio shakes his head. “It’s disgusting,” he says. “You look like one of the monsters.” There’s something like worry in his eyes.

“You think _ I _ would go bad? Me?” Jiminy tries to smile reassuringly, though he doesn’t have the lips for it anymore. “I--Look.”

He reaches into his chest, warm and pulsing. Under the skin and through the ribs, he gets hold of the bit of brilliant heat that’s taken up in his heart. He drags it out. His chest flutters, his shriveled heart searching for its source. “See?” he says weakly. “Still collecting.”

Pinocchio only could’ve seen it once before, but Jiminy knows he remembers it. Elemental goodness is hard to forget. He breaths sharply in. “ _ Beautiful. _ ” 

His eyes are aglow with starlight. He reaches out, his fingers trembling.

The starshard sparks at his touch, and he snatches back his hand. Feeling violated in some intangible way, Jiminy drops the shard, which snaps back into his chest. He takes a deep breath and lets out a chuckle. “Haven’t been keeping up with your conscience lately, eh?”

Pinocchio scratches his neck. The hair is standing up on the back of his hand, glowing with a faint light. “Things have changed,” he says. “The darkness is rising. The monsters want magic. Your kind is hard to find, and I’m easy. I’m all human.” 

He reaches under his desk and pulls out a corpse. Maybe it was once a rat, but now it looks more like Jiminy, long and stringy and not quite right. It doesn’t have skin, just clumps of loose fur, and ripped blood vessels bleeding greenish-black pus.

Jiminy prods the creature with his antennae. It doesn’t respond. “What is it?” he asks.

“Don’t know.” Pinocchio lights a match. “Showed up a couple hours ago. I was going to drop it on the burn pile with the rest.”

He puts the match to the creature’s sticky black fur. It burns to nothing in seconds. Pinocchio stirs the ashes with the scorched match end. Then he sweeps them off his desk to mix with so much sawdust on the studio floor. “At least they light easy,” he says. “They don’t fear much besides fire.”

“Have they done anything to you?” Jiminy’s seen a lot of magic in his time. What’s happening now is maybe something new, or maybe something ancient. Certainly unnatural. He has no great love for Pinnochio, but he doesn’t want to be his death.

Pinocchio pulls a flask out of his pocket. “It’s hard to tell,” he says. “They haven’t overwhelmed me yet. But I wouldn’t want them to catch me sleeping.”

That explains the eye bags. Pinocchio, for all that he’s young and strong and blessed by the blue fairy, is just a man. He will end. End soon, maybe.

Jiminy will not. “I think I’ll stay the night,” he declares.

He can give Pinocchio sleep, if nothing else.

* * *

Jiminy stays for a while; but he has an itch in his blood, and he inevitably leaves again. Leaves Tuscany, leaves Italy, leaves Europe. He takes to the seas this time, stowing away in the grain supply of a steamship. He visits New York. He wanders the Caucasus. He rides around Hongkong. He returns more often now, visits Italy every couple of years.

But this will be the last time in a while.

He arrives just in time for the funeral, the sun just breaking the horizon. He loves and hates the dawn in equal measure: she is fast and forgetful, old as time and younger than the day. She’s haunted him through all his years. She’s followed him past every trial and tribulation, forever distant and wholly inattentive. She does not love him anymore. And still he cannot forsake her.

The birds are singing in the cemetery, and the gravediggers are marking out a plot for the only person even close to a friend that Jiminy’s had in decades. Dawn will come again tomorrow, and Jiminy will be there to see her.

Small and dark, Jiminy makes his way through the grass. “Hey, kid,” he tries to say, crouching there in the dirt. “It’s been a couple of years. You hung in there for a while.” No one hears him. Jiminy kept his voice for a very long time, longer than he expected; but it’s been millenia, and now his mouth is scarcely a mouth, and the sounds it produces are deep and toneless and croaking.

The tombstone says  _ Loving Son, Loyal Friend. _ Jiminy paid for it three years ago, when he last came to Italy. There aren’t many people at the wake, and none that Jiminy recognizes. “He died in his sleep,” says one to another, as if that’s supposed to be comforting.

They would squash Jiminy if they saw him. Understandably; even Pinnocchio wouldn’t recognize him now. Not with the writhing appendages. The chelicera. The eyes. He hasn’t helped a child in years, because they’re terrified of him. He wants it to end. He’s wanted it to end for a while. He misses his friends. He misses home. He even misses his wife.

And still they won’t let him go. Not just yet.

He sighs, looking for an egress, and touches the stone one last time. “Put in a good word for me, will you?” He doesn’t wait for an answer.

The toy shop has lost its owner. There’s no one, boy or man, to replace him. And Jiminy is tired of traveling.

* * *

The children stand in front of the toy shop.

“We have to go in,” says the girl.

“We  _ don’t _ ,” says the boy.

“We have to, Lucca,” she says, her voice barely wavering. “It’s either the shop or the streets. There’s no danger in there”

“If it were safe, it wouldn’t be abandoned.” The boy tugs at her sleeves, casting nervous glances at the shop. “There have to be ghosts. Or monsters. Remember Signore Bruscetti? How he--”

“You can’t prove it was this house.”

“You can’t prove it  _ wasn’t _ .”

There is a brief contest of wills. The girl wins. They open the door.

It is black inside, pitch-black. The light that comes through the doorway lingers nervously at the threshhold; the windows are long overgrown with vines. The only sound is the airy creaking of settling wood. Maria lights a candle. Lucca hesitantly closes the door.

“It’s strange,” he says, “How quiet it is.”

“Yes,” says Maria.

“Just for the night?”

Maria nods. “But we should see what we can find.” She raises the candle, the light eating away at the darkness around them. A shadow flickers away a second too late. She points at the dusty old boxes under the workbench. “Check those, will you?”

Lucca walks over. Something echoes in his footsteps--a curious skittering sound. He ignores it. They don’t have to be here long.

He picks up a box. It’s light. Too light. He checks the others, but they’re not much better. Just a few useless chunks of wood. “Nothing good,” he says. Unless they want to set the house on fire.

“Not here, either,” Maria says, standing up from the boxes she was checking.

Together, they look at the staircase.

Maria frowns thoughtfully. “Maybe no one’s picked over the upper floor. ”

“We shouldn’t,” says Lucca.

“We’d better,” says Maria.

They go up. The staircase is thin and wobbly, the walls slightly damp. The darkness on the second floor is so thick that they can’t find the window. They skirt along the wall, searching for something to take. Something to remind them that this was once a normal toy shop. There’s a workbench. More boxes. More skittering.

Maria trips--the candle clatters to the floor, and goes out. Maria shouts, and Lucca grabs her hand. Something else grabs her foot. It starts pulling her towards the wall. Lucca pulls back with all his might, but he is small and the house is big. Something scrapes. Something crashes. Something croaks, deep and harsh.

“Let her go!” says Lucca. “Let her go!”

He grabs blindly at whatever’s holding Maria. It evades his grip. Maria kicks backwards, but it doesnt affect her attacker. “Get off!” she shouts. Fabric tears. There are rustling sounds, all around them.

“Leave us alone!” cries Lucca. “We’re just kids!”

The building goes still. It sighs. The darkness seems to fall back. And buried deep within the sharp edges and rotting reeds that cake the floor, a light starts to glow. It glows blue, brighter and brighter, pulsing gently with a thrumming bass. It is small and brilliant, the warmth touching the children from across the room.

It goes out. The house shivers. Whatever it is drops its hold on Maria’s ankle. 

The children retreat to the middle of the room, but the house has gone still.

“What was that?” asks Maria.

“I don’t know,” says Lucca. “We have to leave.” 

“Where would we go?” asks Maria. Neither of them have an answer to that.

The floar creaks, and they both jump. The fire sparks to life: it looks like a normal fire. In the light, the room looks like a normal room. There are boxes and dust and an old table. There are blackened walls and cracked floor panels. There is a bed.

“It could have killed us before,” says Lucca. “And it didn’t.”

“No,” says Maria, “It didn’t.”

The staircase is still dark and narrow and slimy. The bed is far more enticing than the streets. The two children curl together and do their best to sleep.

They wake up at dawn: somehow, light has managed to wind itself through the mostly-blocked windows, and the fire has burned through the night. In the boxes, they find half a loaf of bread--only slightly stale--and two unbruised apples. A thief’s stash, perhaps, forgotten in the past week. They also find a doll. Lucca tucks it into their bag.

“We should go,” says Maria, still nervous.

“Yeah,” says Lucca.

They put out the fire and make their way down the staircase. The house sighs as they leave, and it feels like an invitation to return.

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. So this is my pitch for the Pinocchio live action movie... I think it would fix a lot of the... uhhh... plot holes...  
> 2\. If the Greek mythology bit was a bit incomprehensible, understandable. Basically, Eos (the dawn goddess (really, the dawn titan)) falls in love with this young man Tithonus and asks that Zeus make him immortal. Unfortunately, she didn't ask for him to give Tithonus eternal youth, so the unfortunate man just gets older and older until he turns into a cicada/grasshopper. I think you can see where this is going.  
> 3\. Yes. I did take some biological liberties. I know crickets and grasshoppers and cicadas are not the same thing. I also know Disney's Jiminy Cricket is not a fucking cricket, but a horrible little man with a handful of insectoid features. There is one good reason why a horrible little man would have a handful of insectoid features. I refer to you to point 2. There. I have fixed Jiminy Cricket's backstory while still allowing Disney to preserve his beloved character design for future productions. Refer to point 1. There. Now feel free admire my assiduous continuity, organizational skills, and dedication to an evidence-based approach to learning.  
> 4\. I have never watched the original Pinocchio and I do not intend to.  
> 5\. Factual accuracy is for nerds.


End file.
